How Cut-Through Content Can Land Your Dream Job

By Caroline Schmidt

Share on:

Let’s face it, landing your dream job is hard. When it comes to careers, perseverance goes a long way. But if you’re consistently hitting a brick wall, it’s important to recognise what you’re doing wrong and shake up your strategy.

The truth is, you needmore than a well-designed resume and great references to cut-through the crowd. You need to be using fresh, optimised content to win over potential employers – in much the same way brands and organisations do to stand out from the competition.

To help you get on track, here are some different ways you can do just this.

Social Media Overhaul

It’s no surprise that your social media presence could hinder landing that dream job. We live in an engagement economy, where everyone and everything is connected. From the major channels (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Linkedin) to the lesser known platforms (Medium or Soundcloud).

The truth is, employers and recruiters are looking at more than just your resume. They’re checking you out on all your social media platforms, looking for content that not only reflects the personality of their brand, but works against it. They will learn a lot from these profiles - more than your resume I daresay. So, it’s in your best interest to clean them up.

Firstly, take time to make your profiles are fleshed out with keywords. To boost your credibility, get recommendations from industry colleagues and friends too. It’s also important to clean up your profile to remove offensive or negative content. When it comes to Twitter or Medium, use these platforms to share relevant articles and engage in interesting industry discussions.

Creating cut-through content on social media is all about depth and the layers, not only who you are connected to but the media outlets you read and engage with. Endorsed skills are easy to have, sharing the right content, with the right view is trickier.

It’s Time To Get Visual

Everyone is obsessed with visual content – and for good reason. It’s engaging, easy to digest, and can really show off your creativity. Let’s start with the resume. The job market is hugely competitive, regardless of your industry. So it’s worth getting creative and using graphic design software such asCanva orAdobe Photoshop.

If you aren’t sure how to use these tools, there’s not a shortage of short courses available for a basic walkthrough. You can apply these same design principles to create great presentations, or online portfolios to showcase your work.

The Blogging Boost

When it comes to job hunting, feeling voiceless is all too common. More often than not your CV gets added to a growing pile, and you don’t even get a chance to express yourself in an interview. So how do you show employers that you’re actually worth listening to?

Blogging is one answer, particularly if you can relate it to your career in some way. Writing a blog gives you the opportunity to create relevant and visually impressive content in a unique voice, as well as connect with peers and influencers in your professional network.

Importantly, it shows potential employers that you’re tech-savvy, professional, and committed to the industry. Create a keyword strategy for your website and optimise the design and copy for a great user experience, this will help to attract the right people who are looking specifically for what your skills offer.

Remembering Your Human Side

It’s the golden rule – but easily forgotten. No matter what platform you’re communicating on, at the end of the day, you’re talking to real people and real employers. This means you need to streamline your content so that it’s well written, relatable, and casual when it needs to be.

Try to cut the fluff, ditch the clichés and buzzwords, and instead focus on creating content that is unique and interesting - and most importantly, native to the platform that you’re sharing it on. If creating content to build your profile feels like a large volume of work, start with one video and then create an article, or a podcast off the back of that - great content stems from great content.

Taking a fresh approach will help you to get noticed. If you’re finding the job hunt overwhelming, you can always get up to speed with a short course – whether it’s in digital media, writing for the web, graphic design, or something that simply refreshes your view and gives you new skills.

Author Bio

Caroline Schmidt writes the blogs forKangan Institute. She is passionate about education, careers, and giving advice to students of all ages.

Social Hire - the Social Media Agency for recruiters and small businesses. With outstanding Social Media Agency reviews on Google and exceptional client retention rates, the team at Social Hire really do know what works (and just as importantly, what doesn’t work). Why not engage a Social Media Agency that not only gets results, but that does so for a third of the cost of employing an in-house Social Media Manager? Simply click "Book a Call" to speak to one of our friendly team.